PROJECT TITLE: Project # 2: Smoking Cues in Anti-tobacco PSAs PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS: Caryn Lerman, Ph.D., Joseph N. Cappella, Ph.D. KEY PERSONNEL: Lerman (15%), Cappella (10%), Andrew Strasser, Ph.D. (15%), E. Paul Wileyto, Ph.D. (10%), Chris Jepson (5%). PROJECT SUMMARY: Tobacco use is the greatest preventable cause of death worldwide yet about 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. continue to smoke. Message campaigns, such as public service announcements (PSAs), designed to increase the awareness of the health harms of tobacco use, have shown initial promising findings. This has led to exploration of the features of anti-tobacco PSAs that are most and least persuasive, including types of appeals and PSA components or features. Anti-smoking mass media campaigns often present smoking-related cues (e.g., seeing someone smoke) to illustrate the negative consequences of smoking). However, these smoking-related "cues" can elicit strong smoking urges, providing a key motivation for continued smoking in the face of a desire to quit. Our preliminary research shows that when chronic smokers view anti-smoking PSAs that include smoking cues, their urges to smoke increase significantly - if the central argument of the PSA is weak. To extend this research, we propose to study the effects of smoking cues in anti-tobacco PSAs on smoking urges, message processing, persuasion, and smoking behavior in a sample of 300 chronic smoking adults. This laboratory-based study will use a 3 (smoking cue: no cue/peripheral cue/central cue) x 2 (low/high argument strength) factorial (between-subject) design. PSAs in different conditions will be balanced for multiple explicit and implicit ad features. The primary outcomes are: 1) smoking urges, 2) message processing (recall, perceived ad effectiveness), and 3) persuasion (attitudes, self-efficacy, intentions). In addition, participants will be monitored for physiological arousal (heart rate, skin conductance) elicited during cue presentation. Following the session, we will permit participants to smoke in the smoking research laboratory and assess latency and consumption, thus serving as a behavioral measure of PSA smoking cue effects. Results from this study may importantly provide empirical support for better development of anti-smoking PSAs, and to support restrictions on tobacco industry adver